23 March 2015

“Induction” is the process of
making a new recruit, or a promoted person, aware of everything necessary for
an individual to perform normal duties in an organisation, at any level.

Induction is therefore not
the same thing as “Political Education”, and this course will contain relatively
little of what is usually regarded as politics, as compared to other Communist
University courses. (For an introductory course in political matters, please
use the “Basics” course that we have just completed.)

History of organisation

On the other hand, the
material of the course is far from being without political consequences. Organisation
is not class-neutral, and it is not apolitical. It has a history, and it has a
pre-history of social structure even if unselfconscious and only led by
“organic intellectuals”.

The conscious principles of
organisation are as old as the origin of the family, private property and the
state. The oldest forms of organisation within class-divided society are
religious, legal and military, corresponding to the necessities of the original
state (when society first divided into antagonistic classes).

Among the oldest still-existing
corporations in the West are the Church of Rome and its orders. Notable among
them is the order of St Benedict (480–547), originating shortly after the fall
of the Roman Empire of the West. The Benedictine model relied, not on
allegiance to a central power, but on adherence to a common set of rules (“St. Benedict’s Rule”). In
other words, it was truly “organised”. It relied on organisation more than it
relied on what is nowadays called a “power structure” or central command. In
this course, we shall continue to sustain the critical distinction between
power and organisation, or in other words, between the mechanically
hierarchical and the socially organic.

The monastic tradition that
St Benedict successfully codified had earlier been brought to Europe from
Africa, and it may have originated further East, possibly in India. With this
donation, Africa helped to rescue Europe. It was the monasteries that eventually
brought Western Europe back from its descent into barbarism. The Church
provided the clerical framework and bureaucracy that the European states needed
while they grew again slowly, over a period of a thousand years, in the
centuries of feudalism that are called “The Dark Ages” and “The Middle Ages”.

Companies

Secular trading corporations
and permanent military organisation (standing armies and navies) did not arrive
until the bourgeoisie became (first in Italy) a prosperous and powerful class,
and at last, from the 16th and 17th Centuries onwards, a
ruling class in the Netherlands and in Britain.

The word “Office” comes from
the Italian “Uffizi”, notably used in Renaissance Florence. Double-entry book-keeping
was developed during the Italian Renaissance, in Florence and in Genoa, and was
for the first time described as a system by Luca Pacioli, a Franciscan Friar
and friend of Leonardo da Vinci’s, in Milan.

The bourgeois ability to
organise on a large scale, and to project its organisation overseas, meant that
European culture at last surpassed, in many ways, the level of development that
the ancient Romans had achieved and then lost, more than a thousand years
before. Unfortunately, bourgeois society was also no less brutal and cruel than
that of the Romans. In the beginning of its ascendency, it relied, as the Romans
had done, on chattel slavery.

The ways and means of
bourgeois organisation were among the reasons for the success of capitalism
over all other systems, most spectacularly so following the French Revolution
of 1789, its export by force of arms under Napoleon Bonaparte, and the
contemporaneous bourgeois “Industrial Revolution” in England.

By the fifth decade of the 19th
Century, bourgeois capitalism (that is, wage slavery as opposed to chattel
slavery) was set to rule the world, such that in the same historic moment, Karl
Marx and Frederick Engels were able to observe in the Communist Manifesto of
1848:

“All fixed,
fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and
opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can
ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man
is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and
his relations with his kind.... the bourgeoisie... must nestle everywhere, settle
everywhere, establish connections everywhere.”

Enter the grave-digger

So long as the opponents of
capitalism have less-well-developed means of organisation, they are very
unlikely to be able to succeed in overthrowing the bourgeois class from its seat
of power. But the working-class proletariat that the bourgeoisie brings forth
from the old agrarian society that it has ruined, is drilled and organised - by
the bourgeoisie - like no other before it.

All that remains is for the
working class to become a self-conscious class for itself (the political task
of the communists) and then to seize hold of all the means that the bourgeoisie
has developed, and forced the working class to learn. The working class must
become better at all kinds of organisation than the previous masters of
organisation, the bourgeoisie, have been.

And this is very possible.

Therefore, although we may
appear in this course to be considering other matters than politics, yet our
motives for doing so are extremely political. These are some of the indispensable
means to political power, and that is why we want to possess them.

Attached, please find Amilcar
Cabral’s pamphlet “Apply Party Principles in Practice”. In it, please note that
a “watchword” means the same as what we would call a “slogan”.